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Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

> Now people prefer the urban areas.

That's not new. What also isn't new is that when those same people get married and have kids, they'll be looking to move out of that urban environment.

And all of that is completely unrelated to what the article is about.

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What also isn't new is that when those same people get married and have kids, they'll be looking to move out of that urban environment.

What is new is that people are getting married and having kids much later, or not at all, and so they're staying in urban areas for much longer.

It's amusing how HN as a community seems to have conveniently forgotten about the move-to-the-city trope, where small-town kid dreams of moving to the Big Apple/Hollywood and making his/her mark on the world.

I think it is releated. The economic factors that have shifted jobs away from the land and into the cities are the same ones that attract young people to the cities.

The article is about the government wanting to close towns because it is too expensive to provide services that they must to citizens that live there. It's not about people moving from small towns to cities because they want different types of jobs.

You don't think those phenomena might be related?

No, the issue in Newfoundland is the collapse of the fisheries, not because more kids went to college. This isn't towns having an issue because more kids don't want to do fishing, this is because there are no fish to bring in.

Somewhere it's the collapse of the fisheries. Somewhere else it's shuttering of factories. And somewhere else it's consolidation of farming. Basically, it's the same thing: dwindling opportunities in the rural areas, and growth in the cities.

People are also having less children which lessens the pressure to exit the city.

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